Top 10 April Fool's Day links

This classic television April Fool dates from 1957, when the BBC's Panorama programme covered the beginning of the spaghetti harvest in Ticino, the Italian-speaking southern canton of Switzerland. Watch it again on the BBC's On This Day mini-site (simply select the right date) and consider that the bulk of the British population had never even seen real spaghetti in 1957.

In 2004, BBC Radio 4's Today programme announced that the traditional theme tune to The Archers was to be scrapped in favour of a new electronic version by Brian Eno. While the carefully crafted report is still a pleasure to listen to (on the Today website, click "Latest reports", then "Arts and Culture" and scroll down to "Archers Theme"), it fails to match radio's finest ever hoax. In 1976, Patrick Moore told Radio 2 listeners that, at precisely 9.47am that day, an unusual alignment of the planets would lessen the Earth's gravitational pull, so that anyone who jumped in the air would feel a strange floating sensation. Hundreds phoned in to say they had experienced the phenomenon.

Each year, BMW runs advertisements in newspapers and magazines trumpeting an unlikely new technical development - from internally adjustable tyre pressures to fly-repellent windscreens. These stopped fooling anyone a long time ago, but are now something of an institution. The archive of ads (click "Company Facts", then "Marketing") does not include the best: the revelation that fake BMWs were in circulation and could be recognised by the colours on the chequered badge being reversed, white where it should be blue and vice versa. Naturally, BMW owners who compared their car with the "correct" version discovered that they had a fake.

The American monthly science magazine Discover has something of a reputation for running stories of dubious veracity in its April edition. An early "discovery" was the hot-headed naked ice borer, a creature unknown to science, found living in Antarctica by one Dr Aprile Pazzo, which tunnels through the ice by melting it with its superheated bones. More recently, Discover reported on the bigon, a fundamental particle the size of a bowling ball, which popped up during experiments by physicist Albert Manque at the Centre de l'Étude des Choses Assez Minuscules in Paris (on the Discover website, search for "bigon").

Internet April Fools jokes are widespread, and Google got in on the act on April 1 2006 with this job ad for a position at its lunar centre. What's nice about this spoof is that it is done so amusingly and at such length: a splendid concept is the high-density, high-delivery hosting, or HiDeHiDeHo. Another of Google's brightest ideas is its sewer-ducted broadband, at google.com/tisp.

Fans of quality newspaper April Fools go all dewy-eyed at the mention of the Island of San Serriffe, created by The Guardian in 1977, ranked number five in the all-time top 100 at the Museum of Hoaxes. Few hoaxes have ever been so wholeheartedly perpetrated: the fictional island had an entire travel supplement dedicated to it. Joining it in the Top 10 are the announcement by Richard Nixon (well, an actor playing him) in 1992 that he would be running for president once more, under the slogan "I didn't do anything wrong, and I won't do it again"; and the news from 1996 that the Liberty Bell had been sponsored by Taco Bell and would henceforth be known as the Taco Liberty Bell - to which a quick-witted White House press officer responded that a similar deal had been struck regarding the Lincoln Memorial, now renamed the Ford Lincoln Continental Memorial.

Visit Wikipedia and search for "April 1 2007" and you will find an exhaustive list of last year's April Fools in the media. Those from British newspapers include: the craze for grow-your-own Viagra (Independent); council inspectors demand a £5 on-the-spot carbon tax for barbecues (Mail on Sunday); Tony Blair to appear on stage in The Crucible (Observer); and cash-strapped London asks Paris if it will consider sharing the Olympics (Sunday Telegraph). On the web, meanwhile, the BBC announced its "sniff-screen technology".

The Fundue is a USB-powered fondue set, so you can dip snack items of your choice into melted cheese (or, indeed, chocolate) while you work at your computer. It's just one of many unlikely new gadgets at Think Geek.

The peculiar thing about trying to find the April Fool story in your newspaper is that you start doubting everything - the vast majority of stories begin to seem extremely unlikely. Tone up your judgment muscles by visiting this website, which specialises in entertaining science news. It pops up unlikely facts at random (bees have five eyes; 70 per cent of the raisins we eat are consumed at breakfast; the most popular colour for toothbrushes is blue) and has an entire section dedicated to the strange but true (click "Strange"), where you can read a list of unlikely things invented in Britain, including the guillotine, the turkey, Swiss roll, Champagne and the Celts.

The origins of April Fool's Day are obscure. There may be connections with a Roman event called a hilaria celebrating Cybele, the mother of the gods, which took place on March 25. It involved impersonating other people for comic effect. Some authorities trace its earliest forms to late medieval France and particularly to the period in which the "Annunciation style" new year on March 25 was switched to the "Circumcision style" date of January 1. (This did not happen in Britain until 1752.) Pleasingly, though, a long-lived English tradition says that foolishness began with the villagers of Gotham, Nottinghamshire, in the reign of King John. Read the story in this online version of the Chamber's Book of Days, a Victorian equivalent of the BBC's On This Day website (click "Calendar of Days", choose April 1 and scroll down to "The Wise Fools of Gotham").